Throughout the last two decades, immunology has become one of the fastest growing medical fields in the world. From the numerous complex systems, to countless different protein complexes playing a crucial role, in homeostasis, allergic reactions, body response to various hostile agents. It sometimes becomes more than just “difficult to understand the subject from basic to its core”, particularly for students struggling with hard academic demands. Guiding individuals through the sea of information, showing them the way and highlighting the most important parts, helping students pass exams with enormous expectations from them, is not an easy job, the job that “Instant Notes in Immunology” book series have been fulfilling since the early 2000th.
As the release of a new “4th addition” has been announced by authors, which will be available for readers from 19th of may on several E-book platforms such as for example taylor and francis group, Medscriptum was thrilled to take closer look on books insides, its purpose, the methods of its creation, and many more. To answer our questions we had a pleasure to talk with the book’s two authors. With Professor Nina Porakishvili: Professor of University of Westminster, Director of the Institute of Immunology and Molecular Medicine at the University of Georgia and With Professor Peter Lydiard, an emeritus professor of immunology, senior academic at the University College London(UCL) and a strong supporter of Georgian science development, receiving a medal from TSU for his contributions.
If you ask me as a correspondent, knowledge should not be out of reach form an interested individual.
not out of physical, nor intellectual, it should be easy to understand, leading you to a depth of science without fear of getting lost, and wasting time. That’s what “Instant Notes series” are great for. being handy and useful for all kinds of individuals, Students, professors, patients, even people without any kind of contact with the medical field itself. That is what I think any hand book should be about. but that’s just my interpretation. More wide and extended answer should always be heard from the architects and creators of the work, because they are the ones envisioning the importance of the book itself.
What purpose does the book serve for an academic field and what makes it stand out compared to other immunology handbooks?
Professor Nina: First of all, Instant Notes is such a catching title. But this book does, although it stands really very attractively, it doesn’t stand alone because, when we discussed it previously, that it’s a whole series of the Instant Notes. And I think they are extremely important because they give you the idea about the area in a condensed, compact way so that you can really kind of look into the most important, the core questions that are associated with this area of research. I think we were always talking about how useful this textbook and other Instant Notes are for students, but they equally are very important for the lecturers. Because if you want a very short time like 45 or whatever minutes or one hour, you have to give a lecture, you need to talk about the most important parts, and that is exactly what we present in this book. Personally, for example, for my other lectures at Westminster, I was using a lot of Instant Notes in Molecular Biology because that was relevant to what I was teaching as well. So I find these books are extremely important from this point of view. They give you condensed, compact and up-to-date information about what is happening in this particular area of research.
Professor Peter: We were trying to focus on the main ways in which you could describe important things that were going on in immunology. And because of its style, it introduced keywords, things that would allow students to revise before their examination because there’s a little kind of summary at the beginning of each chapter. Now, when we did this to start with, that didn’t exist in textbooks. So we introduced that, and we also introduced multiple-choice questions at a time when they weren’t being used. So we started in 2000; 2004 was the second edition; 2011 was the third edition. So it’s now 15 years since, and so much has happened in the core of immunology now.
So that’s what this new edition is doing, we’ve updated all the sections now to what we consider to be the core. But also, taking the students that need to do more and know more it will have up-to-date reviews of areas that we cover basic information about, and new things that are happening. So the idea is that at this point in time, you won’t get more information in a book about immunology, starting from basic immunology to clinical immunology, and also the applications of immunology in terms of treatment. For example, you know, there’s a lot of information there about treatment. And people not even doing medicine can understand things that they’ve read about. Now “immunotherapy,” for example, is a standard word now in the dictionary. People talk about it. So it’s really up-to-date, it’s also trying to introduce the basic things so that people can explore that even though they don’t necessarily know anything about immunology or know about medicine. So it covers, I think, a lot of important areas in the subject and it really has developed significantly and been made up-to-date in several important areas.
I would add that we introduced not in this issue itself, but in previous issues as well about this understanding about how different the immune system is in relation to gender, in women and men. How different is it? You know, the different aspects because, you know, you want to know what’s going on in the female reproductive system, what’s going on in the male system which is different. And also aging. We know very much now much more about the immune changes. Immunosenescence has become a word that as the cells get older, then they do different things. For example, and in fact this talks about the relatively new aspects that have come up about aging. No other books talk about aging in the immune system. If you’re a doctor, you want to know about these changes as you go on and know about differences between males and females. Textbooks don’t do that; this textbook does.
When I was a student, in Medical University I found the majority of the books boring. To be honest I find them boring even now, it’s not that I am lazy, nobody’s lazy if you ask me, but learning is played as a lot of behavioral scientists say. What’s the sport out of it if you don’t enjoy it don’t you think? That’s why books that test you on every step, every chapter or even every article are fun and trust me really educational, combine it with diagrams that explain complex schemes, terms or new concepts much easier and you finish the book fully understanding it without even remembering when you start at all. yes “instant notes were one of the first immunology books introducing multiple choice questions and diagrams in the book and the new edition doesn’t disappoint as well.
The ‘Instant Notes’ series is famous for its diagrams. Why do you think visual learning is so critical for medical students today, and was there a specific concept that was particularly difficult to illustrate simply
Professor Nina: Actually quite a lot of big books in immunology are overloaded with really very complicated schemes. And it’s not really possible to follow them fully, unless you work in the area. If you do your research in the area, then it’s easy for you, then you understand everything. But if you are an average student who might not even follow immunology for your research, or if you are a medical student for patient treatment and so on, then this is too much. And when it is too much, the brain refuses to take it in, and therefore, in fact, you will learn nothing from something which is very complicated. So, I think that was the idea, as Peter mentioned from the very beginning of this series, that the schemes are made as simple as possible. I mean, if you work in this area for example in B cell signaling, where I work, you can prepare such a complex, Text and structures and considered it easy, because you work there, And we had this discussion with Peter, so in the end, we managed to get it down to a simplified version, let’s say. But this is because we have to bear in mind that the students, in order to take in, to understand, and to remember, require structured and simplified diagrams
Professor Peter: So, I think that this book now has got color. This is the first time we have color; before it was black and white. This fourth edition is not all color, but particularly those diagrams that needed to be consistent, standardized through the book. And so what we did was we actually chose colors to represent particular cells. So whenever they saw a picture, there was a rationale for the coloring—that they could actually then relate to a cell. Like, a macrophage would be one color and a particular shape, a B lymphocyte would be one color, a T lymphocyte would be another. So that again makes it different, I think, from other textbooks.
So the whole concept, as Nina already mentioned, is that the Instant Notes is a series and yes we introduced diagrams in our books in 2000. Before that for teaching at that point, we didn’t have PowerPoint, we didn’t have things like, you know, even slides, you know, slide projectors and so on. And before that, making slides was complex to get done. And I used to, right from the start, and I still do it, I still enjoy it. it is actually writing on the board. And simple diagrams on the board as you go along, you talk to students I still do this because I think it’s important that students see how things develop when you’re writing them on the board. And so in those days, you tried to make it as simple as possible. So from that, then it made sense to create these simple diagrams, like line diagrams, almost like I would draw on the board for students. And it made sense to do it that way. It turns out, obviously, that that was very good for the book and that kind of sold this instance, right from the beginning, as being good because students could reproduce the diagrams and understand them better, I think, because they didn’t have all these color things going on. So, I think that’s how it developed. And of course, the other thing is that for students to learn something as complex as immunology, I think you have to have diagrams. Without a doubt. It is visual, and it helps you understand what’s going on.
And the million dollar question is: (from the University students of course) does it do the job? Will The book help me pass the exams? And I think I have a simple answer to this question- It will do more than that. It will also leave you with the knowledge. Information that i dont think reader will forget easily If one gives its heart of course.
The book is considered as an optimal guide to use before examinations. As authors, how do you think the book will help?
Professor Peter: first of all,in the book originally, the first thing we introduced with the help of Michael Fanger, was MCQs [Multiple Choice Questions] and so on because students, both science and medical students, were actually examined mainly by MCQs. So having the MCQs was important because they could be used by students as a test. Now they’re online, of course. Now you don’t need the book specifically because these examination boards will put on their specific MCQ examples for the students. But we still kept them. The problem with MCQ-s in every old book is that old MCQs used to give you four or five answers and only one of them was right. And it didn’t say why the others were wrong. Our MCQs online, which are available for the students who have the books and so on, they actually tell the student why they’re not right. Which I think is really important. Because if what’s wrong, they need to know why it’s wrong. and that helps with their thought process. And I think probably makes it more imprinted in their brain as to what the answer should be and why the other answers relate to it.
you mentioned that it was also quite useful for people with non-medical knowledge. The first group of people which came to my mind actually were the patients, who don’t have any prior knowledge about their diseases, how their therapy works and so on. Do you consider that this book would be pretty helpful for them as well, to learn things about themselves and their conditions?
Um, I think that this book will be useful for people who are not specialists in the area of immunology, but they need to have the knowledge in basic biology. So, therefore, they need to know, for example, when we’re talking about transcription, translation of the proteins, what does this mean? And for example, yes, you can learn about antibodies, proteins and so on, but you need to have a general idea what protein actually means, and so on. So I would say that people who are not the specialists in the area, but the ones who have the basic biology science, not just science, not physicists or let’s say, maybe chemists would understand as well, better, but something like the area and related areas, but they just want to learn immunology from scratch. But you know how a cell works, and what for example the spleen is or the liver is and so on. So I think that this is limited depending on what is the area of knowledge of the patient. However, having said that, Peter and I had this idea of writing a textbook for actually addressing the lay audience let’s say, so maybe that will be in the future.
Throughout the interview, it was a real pleasure listening to these two great people. As a young person, you always look up to the individuals who have much to share, more experience you can learn from. Introducing myself to the book was exactly gaining full excess on the vast experience they possess. So my last question was exactly about guidance and nothing more.
For young doctors or students, someone just starting to learn about the ‘invisible war’ happening inside our bodies, what is your advice? One fundamental rule of immunology that book definitely helps us always to remember?
professor Nina: Um, I think that the book is actually designed in the way that it starts with simple and then gets more complicated. So you start with the general knowledge about what cells are involved in in immune system, what are those cells, how they develop and so on, what molecules are involved and in the immune responses, it starts with the information that is already expected from the student to know, to a certain extent, so this is the information that, you know, and you always need to refresh something in your mind and that reminded me as something that I will say at the end. So, it starts with the simple schemes and these simple descriptions of cells and so on. It gets then more complex telling you how those cells develop and then what they do. And in the end actually, there are more complex areas which are for the first time in this book, and Peter will probably mention those, like the immunology and aging and so on, that’s never been to this book before. So therefore not only for the students who start learning it is easier because they’re eased in this area by just starting to read from the very beginning. Having said that, if you already have the general knowledge and you want to refresh your information on let’s say B lymphocytes, or T lymphocytes, or their development, or their function, you can take one chapter out of this book, one section and read this section. So it gives you flexibility whether you would like to start from scratch and just follow the sections because they’ll get more and more complex, or you would like to refresh your knowledge in one particular area. And that brings a very important point that this book is very good for refresheing. The people who learned immunology like 10 years ago, 20 years ago, they would like to refresh the knowledge, so they’ll be able to use this book for that reason as well.
Professor Peter: I would say learn first, and book always heps you in the process but important part is never to hesitate to come back and test yourself once again.
Speaking with Professor Nina Porakishvili and Professor Peter Lydyard made one thing clear: this book was never meant to be just another textbook. It is a tool, a guide, and in many ways, a bridge between confusion and understanding. Built on years of teaching experience and shaped by the real struggles of students, it reflects a philosophy that learning should be active, visual, and continuously reinforced.
As a correspondent, I began with a simple belief—that knowledge should never feel out of reach. After this conversation, that belief feels less like an opinion and more like a standard. And if there is one takeaway from both the book and its authors, it is this: understanding complex science is not about simplifying the truth, but about presenting it in a way that invites you to keep going.
